Compassion: Boon and Bane of Animal Rights

Compassion can move people to act, but obtaining legal
rights for nonhuman animals will require fundamental change. Expressing our
feelings and getting others to express theirs, while important, cannot
produce the necessary social and political movement.

A key objective of the animal rights movement is to bring a dramatic
reduction in animal suffering – nonhuman animals need legal rights because
humans routinely destroy billions of them and cause billions to suffer.
So it makes sense to understand how compassion can contribute to the
movement’s success. To understand that, we must understand that merely
nurturing or expressing compassion is neither a strategy, an interim
objective, nor a long-term goal of the animal rights movement.

Compassion as it applies to policies and practices concerning nonhuman
animals mainly moves people to wish animals were treated better, sometimes
to request better treatment, or at least to refrain from opposing it. It
should go without saying that appealing to compassion is a basic necessity
for establishing animals’ rights – a human world that does not care at all
will not consider animal rights. But that is a far cry from saying any
amount of caring in and of itself can ever establish animal rights.

Nearly every human being living today probably cares about nonhuman
animals to some extent. The same was probably true for nearly every
human being who lived in the past. The percentage of people believed
to have no capacity for empathy whatsoever is very small. But for well
over a century, organized efforts to promote compassion and to legislate
better treatment of animals have had no effect at all on animals’ legal
status and therefore cannot establish rights or end even the most severe
mistreatment of animals. If anything, they have solidified other
animals’ status as human property by promoting assumptions that compassion
and rules based on it can protect animals.

No amount of better treatment for animals considered property or life
unworthy of life will ever amount to rights. Rights can reduce animal
suffering, but working to reduce suffering without establishing rights is a
massive wheel-spinning exercise. Just as I think it would be inhumane
to induce a nonhuman animal to run on a treadmill until he or she dropped
from exhaustion, I think it is inhumane to lead well-intentioned humans to
believe they can significantly reduce animal suffering without making animal
rights their explicit goal and the basis of their language, tactics, and
strategies.

But the enormity of the animals’ suffering and the difficulty of
promoting rights for beings who cannot speak for themselves and for
thousands of years have been treated as property and life unworthy of life
(many not treated as property are destroyed or driven from their homes for
even the most frivolous human uses of land) move some advocates to abandon
rights advocacy, having engaged in it little or not at all. Wishing
animals could have rights and believing they are promoting rights by
expressing compassion for animals and revulsion at cruelty and supporting
any effort that conceivably can "help animals," some call their activities
"animal rights" when even their "victories" have nothing to do with
establishing rights and in fact further separate the animals from their
rights.

Particularly with the news industry failing to distinguish between animal
rights and animal "welfare" practices over a century old, confusion reigns.
Compassion for animals and revulsion at cruelty are in no way wrong, of
course. But for specific undeniable reasons, they cannot form the
basis for animal rights. For related reasons, neither can eating only
plants and urging others to do the same, getting people to "care" by
exposing cruelty, and other practices that, even though well-intentioned and
worthwhile, will always in and of themselves fail to establish animals’
basic rights.

Compassion is a personal trait. Present to different degrees in
different people, manifested in a variety of ways in a variety of
circumstances, it can move people to want changes in laws and policies.
But without clear and complete understanding of the sources of suffering and
of the need for fundamental rather than superficial change to eliminate
those sources, it can move people to accept what amounts to a cough drop to
treat pneumonia. Official displays of compassion and legislation
superficially appearing to require improved treatment mollify and even
elicit celebrations when nothing fundamental in the animals’ plight changes.
Compassion is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights, the
Emancipation Proclamation, any other rights-conferring document, or even any
anticruelty statute I know of. The Declaration of the Rights of
Animals, too, is mute on compassion. That is highly significant for
how we should view the role and limits of compassion in advancing animal
rights.

Rights are legally enforceable; compassion is not. The goal of the
animal rights movement is to establish nonhuman animals’ moral rights in law
and custom, somewhat as human rights are established in the U.S.
Rights do not afford complete protection against injustice, nor are they
always enforced. But basic rights are easy to understand – Americans
constantly infer their "right" to this or that from their basic rights – and
they work to a large extent. They prohibit the state from inflicting
certain kinds of harm on individual persons, because the state possesses
overwhelming power to inflict harm.

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, in his 2005 book Rights
from Wrongs, explains how rights come from wrongs – from injustices.
Justice, not compassion, is the basis of rights. Opinions can differ on what
resolution to a given situation will best serve "the interest of justice,"
but justice is observable in the world outside of the individual person.
It is not a personal trait like compassion, even if one’s "sense of justice"
is and even if compassion may inform one’s sense of what is just.
Government, with overwhelming might, must be prevented from tyrannizing
individual people; likewise humans, due to their capacity to inflict harm,
must be prevented from tyrannizing nonhuman animals. That is the case
no matter how much suffering may be caused or how much compassion elicited
from any particular manifestation of tyranny or injustice. Rights
obstruct imposition of the conditions for suffering, not suffering itself.

My right not to be the property of another human being does not depend on
individual people’s compassion but on the Constitution and laws and customs
flowing from it. Perhaps someone would like to enslave me or sell me
into slavery if they could. My rights as a human being in the United
States trump their greed, cruelty, lack of compassion – any personal trait –
so they would have to go to great lengths to succeed in making a slave of
me. No claim to being compassionate can suffice in a U.S. court to
enable someone to enslave me. Not so for nonhuman animals, who have no
legal rights. And their current legal status is inherently a basis for
constant human-inflicted suffering and destruction, notwithstanding laws and
regulations that may appear on the surface to mitigate them.
Compassion leads many animal advocates to treat nonhuman animals as if they
had legal rights – we seek loving homes for them, swear off eating them, and
more – but in and of themselves those practices do not lead to establishment
of any legal rights.

A nonhuman animal’s right not to be the property of a human being, when
that right is established in law, will trump even a majority human
preference that nonhuman animals remain property. Thousands of years
of learning human supremacist ideologies from birth will make animal rights
more difficult to enforce than human rights, perhaps, but without rights,
nonhuman animals can have no meaningful protection.

The animal rights movement arose from the failure of animal "welfare" –
now the status quo – to protect meaningfully, to provide genuine welfare, or
overall wellbeing. Regulation and exhortation based on compassion
could not possibly do the job, no matter how dedicated or talented animal
"welfare" proponents or how large their ranks. Cruel mistreatment of
animals, animal exploitation, and wanton destruction of animals grew rapidly
under animal "welfare." And it is no coincidence that their growth
coincided with the emergence of a massive corporate oligarchy as the
dominant force in the U.S., threatening human rights as well as making it
all the more difficult to protect nonhuman animals.

As non-animate entities, incapable of any experience, perception,
thought, or feeling, corporations cannot have or show compassion.
Public-relations doublespeak and advertisements easily confuse. "A
message of caring from Johnson & Johnson," concluded a recent television ad.
Driving the problem, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that corporations have
the same legal rights as actual persons. Wielding tremendous power and
being able to devastate sentient beings without themselves feeling anything
or risking retaliation in kind, corporations are always potentially
dangerous. Unjustly treated human beings used to get together and burn
down unjust aristocrats’ mansions, tar & feather their lackeys, and the
like. Now responsible parties are nearly impossible to locate, and
corporations go on as before no matter what happens to individual directors,
managers, or workers, like the surface of a lake hit by a rock.

Slaughterhouses, factory farms, colleges of agriculture, shampoo
manufacturers, zoos, dog tracks, timber companies, and others take their
terrible toll on nonhuman animals as decided by boards of directors.
Front-line workers can quit because of cruel mistreatment of animals, but
their jobs will never be vacant for long. Corporate capitalism relies
on a desperate, impoverished human underclass willing to suppress their
compassion to have a roof overhead and food on the table and powerless to
influence policy or practice. Some feel it is right to place
compassion for their children and other dependents above compassion for
nonhuman animals and wrong to do otherwise. Some feel taking property
– sentient or not – from owners shows a lack of compassion since speciesist
ideologies learned from birth place even minor human interests over the most
basic nonhuman interests.

Exercising compassion on a personal basis will not create the needed
boundaries between corporations and nonhuman animals. And individual
people tend to imitate corporations – their latest "slave masters," as
pointed out by attorney Gerry Spence in his book Give Me Liberty!: Freeing
Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century – just as scholars have shown actual
slaves tend to imitate slave masters, prisoners their guards, and so on.
So until all sentient beings’ moral rights are established in law and
custom, we can expect more and more suppression of compassion, evasion of
responsibility, pleadings of conflict between compassion for animals and
compassion for family members and other "shareholders," and the like.

So informed, focused, persistent abolitionist educational and political
activities are required to advance animal rights. I believe
legislatures in the U.S. are as yet unripe for seriously advancing animal
rights and today can only be counted upon, for the most part, to make
"welfare" improvements, which are counterproductive with respect to rights.
It is important to educate legislators constantly, though, because they are
influential people connected to many other influential people including
corporation directors. And because there are occasional openings for
progress through legislation, I wrote "Get Political for Animals: What Does
That Mean?" (Animal Writes, March 27, 2005; also available on the "Animal
Rights" page at www.RPAforAll.org) , outlining specific factors
distinguishing abolitionist legislation that can advance animal rights from
legislation that merely tinkers with the animal-exploitation status quo.

The animal rights movement is suppressed when advocates rely on
compassion while identifying their cause as animal rights. That is
because compassion-based advocacy does not threaten the
industry-government-media complex that perpetuates animal exploitation and
destruction; therefore some legislators are willing to team up with
compassion advocates; and concrete short-term "welfare" victories are
illusory with regard to animal rights. Except when they abolish
exploitive practices altogether without providing exploitive alternatives,
they bring no progress toward rights for nonhuman animals.

All of this is not to deny compassion is a wonderful trait. But
rights are more likely to stimulate compassion than vice versa.
Justice for nonhuman animals must be achieved under the rule of law that our
system aspires to. It is the non-personal nature of justice that
minimizes tyranny, for today’s liberator quickly becomes tomorrow’s tyrant.
Does "compassionate conservative" ring a bell? And will Bush’s "tidal
wave of compassion" carry a rescue fleet to those in need or just wash away
concerns that the President "doesn’t care"? Even the Nazi Holocaust
was billed as solving a "problem" for the truly worthy and thus an act of
compassion. Some participants spoke of killing Jewish children
"humanely."

When our society confers rights, it draws boundaries others cannot cross
with impunity when the system functions properly. Ensuring that the
system functions properly requires constant vigilance – that will be the
same for nonhuman animals as for human beings, even after animals’ rights
are established under the law. But vigilance for animals with only
moral rights ensures nothing. Respecting the boundaries rights
establish gives people the experience of treating others as they themselves
would like to be treated. Whether people treat others appropriately is
more important than whether they do so out of compassion.

So, when people who would like nonhuman animals to have rights limit
their advocacy to nurturing compassion and favorable personal practices
rather than on clear strategies for changing society’s institutions and the
use of public funds, they hurt their ostensible cause and transform it into
another that perpetuates the status quo. No wonder the
industry-government-media complex treats animal rights as a threat but
embraces animal "welfare"! Slaughter can never be humane despite a
"Humane Slaughter Act." To operate as if compassionate, human society
must eliminate nonhuman-animal slavery and unworthy-of-life categories, not
merely regulate speciesist practices.

Compassion toward nonhuman animals will always be desirable. But
when the animal rights movement succeeds, the animals will not have to rely
on such an undependable personal trait as compassion, because far fewer
animals will live under the boot and the backhoe. The fact that the
goal is so terribly far off does not mean it is unattainable – unless we
fail to pursue it. David Cantor is a full-time animal advocate since 1989
and directs Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc.

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